Written On The Brain

There are people I just shouldn’t read. Jeanette Winterson, whose “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal” I’m close to finishing, is probably one. Winterson has a gift for navel-gazing that borders (if not actually crossing that border) on the pathological, and while I couldn’t do a vocal impression to save my life, I am something of a sponge for style – when I read, or even in some instances, watch, something that digs in deep to me, I tend to mimic it for at least a little while, till the mundanity of Stuff To Do or proper conversations brings me round. So reading Winterson, who appears to take her own existence with a degree of seriousness that normally baffles me, is probably not good for me – as though her self-regard is catching, like cooties or coldsores.

I was thinking about this, stuck on Cardiff Central train station after delays outside of Reading had made me miss my connection. In fact, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, under the surface – one of the most amazing human beings I’ve ever known was known, to me at least, as Emmie (though in her native Austria, her name was Hermina. She was a spiritualist, for whatever you find that worth, and, perhaps weirdly given the fact that she was in her late 60s and I was just a teenager when I knew her, she was the first person to let me have her manuscript to edit. I did it shamefully wrong, bringing my own style and essentially scrawling all over her work, unable to swallow my own pride down, and certain I could do a better job of her book than she could. It’s a lesson in humility I think I’ve learned by now, but it still shamed me when she told me she wouldn’t be using my version. Actually, it was my own rage that shamed me. “Go ahead, then!” I thought, silently, about this calm, amazing, insightful woman. “Go ahead, use your version. Bet you it’ll fail!”

I don’t know if it did or not; she didn’t live long after that and her daughter ended up with both versions of the manuscript.  While I burned in youthful, arrogant rejection though, Emmie continued in her beatific, pain-wracked, tender care.

“You’ll go far,” she once told me. “You’ll get there...but only if you raise your voice. No-one can hear you if you mutter...”

It’s the best advice I’ve ever known to be true and conspicuously not taken, and it’s been biting me in the ass recently. There’s the potential, round about now, for a turning point in my life. I could very easily grow old and bitter, my written work souring into piss and vinegar at those who I increasingly consider to be mediocre, but who finish their work, and promote it, and get the lives they want, and make connections with the people they admire on an equal footing, while I (and please excuse the Wintersonian self-regard here) while believing I can do better, go nowhere for the want of taking myself seriously, and sink beneath a weight of normality, and, perhaps, an abnormality of weight.

Which is why reading Winterson right now is probably not a good idea. Every time I read her stories of escape, of flight, of love and what she calls a lost loss, I find myself raging to write rebuttals. Of escape-routes crushed, of love burned bitter and away, of loss unreconciled by lifetime or by fiction, and of life lived daily dimmer to the grave. The one thing I’ll say about reading Winterson is that she makes me want to write – even if what she makes me want to write sounds like the ramblings of a bitter drunk, bloated on loathing of the species, and its secrets and its silences that kill.

Before this comes off sounding like an anti-Winterson campaign, it’s entirely impersonal – other writers have reached in and punched me in the lungs before, or twisted fingers into my brain and not let go. Shakespeare’s Othello, read as a fat and unpopular teen, gave me a model. Richard III, read around the same time, put it into words – “I that am rudely cast and want love’s majesty to strut before a wanton, ambling nymph...this world afford no joy to me but to command, to check, to overbear such as are of better person than myself...” It was by following this model that I began to meddle in the lives of others, and, perhaps inexplicably except to Shakspeare himself, made friendships that have lasted 25 years by virtue of throwing others under buses of various kinds.

This is the point – as a human being, I’ve been thoroughly influenced I’ve changed my world several times, based on this kind of effect. My friend Phil, over now from New Zealand, would never understand that part of the reason why, about seven years ago, I turned into what we both now agree was ‘an arse’ was because I read some Irvine Welsh, identified us with some characters, and decided to break the pattern Welsh had set for ‘us’.

A previous relationship  was doomed for all sorts of reasons, but along with the suicide of a close friend, its break-up was also – and this, surely, must be scary for anyone who values their relationship with me, at whatever level – somewhat fuelled by a handful of songs that reached in and showed me myself. Thank you Nickelback, Elton John, U2 (ick!) and Kate “Who the fuck knew she could sing?” Winslet for making some things clear that needed clearing.

Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth, read entirely too early as a child in single-digits, and then again throughout the course of life, has informed my notions of lust, of family, of identity, ambition and the gulf between the public and the private realities we show.

The Bride Stripped Bare, by Nikki Gemmell, punched me in the heart with a paranoia from which, almost ten years on, I have yet I think to recover. Of course, that wasn’t helped by having so many women friends prepared to tell me a disinterested truth, and confirm its excoriating likelihoods. Some people are scared to open particularly gruesome horror novels. I have always had to own  that book since reading it, but have never had the courage yet to re-read it. Once was enough.

The same is true in theatrical terms for The Woman in Black. Opening up a bottomless pit of will, of what the human being might yet be capable of – and, incidentally, scaring the bejeesus out of me – was a potent thing to do to an unwary Welshman. I’ve now seen Phantom of the Opera several times, and yes, it’s popular entertainment, but the issues it raises – contagion of the body vs contagion of the brain, the mirror darkly peered through with the hero and the villain each reflected in each other, and how the choice of the heroine flits from the daytime and its wholesomeness to the passion and the music of the night...ach.

d tends to let me churn a little while whenever we see the show, knowing that I’ll come back to her, but not until I’ve pushed my Phantom out...

All of which I simply felt like sharing tonight. There are other books I’ve read, other things I’ve seen, that have had impacts on me – Hitch-Hiker’s Guide...Russell T Davies’ Second Coming, Aristotle’s bloody Ethics, Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds...but those I’ve named above are twisting into me tonight, and making something positive out of what feels like quite a dark syringeful of influences. What I’m getting at is that I am striving not to let my spongy brain take in the self-regard of Winterson and make it fling me off in some mad new direction. I’m striving (perhaps ironically) towards an idea she identifies – to live with life, rather than in the excesses of control or snapped elastic. And tonight, I seem to be winning. All those influences, that dark, deep, bloody little syringe of impacts, are feeding in, but far from twisting me tonight, they’re energising me, in a gritty, let’s-get-it-done kind of way. Tomorrow, as I’ve said, we begin again in earnest – most likely from the half-way point of four and a half stone. It’s not time to mourn the stone I’ve probably put back on. It’s time to grit the teeth, do the work, produce the results and push on forward. It’s time to finish this damned thing, the right way, the only way I will or can, by pushing forward to the end.

Back on the spin bike in seven hours from now. But this time I’m going prepared. This time I’m ready. And this time, it’s not a drop in an ocean of vague intent. This time, we go on!